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Original Press Release

MUMBAI — IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently announced a partnership with Lodha Group to build and manage smart city infrastructure for Palava, which will set the benchmark for 21st century urban living in India. Envisioned as a city of opportunity and spanning over 4,000 acres, Palava will incorporate IBM's smarter cities technology using advanced, data driven systems to integrate information from all city operations into a single system to improve efficiency and deliver an enhanced quality of life for residents.

"Palava was born out of a vision to create a city of opportunity, one that would not just offer an unparalleled quality of life to its citizens but also become an ecosystem - nurturing business, creating jobs and delivering growth. To achieve this, we are planning decades ahead, and embedding smart elements in the city's design and infrastructure. This will help ensure safety, efficiency and governance with participation from citizens, and in parallel provide the foundations for businesses with future-ready infrastructure, a vibrant community, a pool of educated and talented professionals, alongside top-rung education, sports and cultural facilities," said Shaishav Dharia, Development Director - Palava, Lodha Group.

"The smart city initiative is key to achieving the level of efficiency and participation to make this vision a reality and we are pleased to partner with IBM, the global leader in smarter cities, to build this first-of-a-kind city in India," he added.

Strategically located at the junction of Navi Mumbai and Dombivali, Palava is envisioned to become the largest ever private, completely planned development in urban India, and one of the top 50 places to live in the world by 2020.

To enable Palava's smarter city development, IBM will provide a foundation to integrate multiple city agencies and provide a unified view into all city functions, helping all departments collaborate, share insight and information to improve the experience for its citizens. By enabling participative government and insight driven actions, city officials will be able to allocate resources better and provide a more resident centric approach to city management. IBM Intelligent Operations serves as the backbone of city infrastructure and centralizes key city functions through real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. Providing a 360 degree view of the key functions for managing the city will enable city officials to allocate resources, adopt preventative maintenance measures and proactively manage issues better that could affect quality of life.

"Recent projections show India's urban population soaring from 340 million in 2008 to 590 million in 2030, which may lead to tremendous strain on urban resources in India. This makes the proliferation of practical and proven smart city interventions into existing and future cities essential. It is our endeavor to make Palava a city that sets the benchmark for future Indian and global cities to emulate," said Dhamodaran Ramakrishnan, Director, Smarter Planet Solutions, IBM India/South Asia.

As a part of this strategic engagement, IBM Global Business Services developed the vision and detailed roadmap for Palava's smarter city imperatives. IBM is also creating the business architecture and operating procedures, implementing the technology platform and solutions, and will eventually manage the technology. The project also consists of the following:

Participative Governance: IBM is building a service platform for citizens to interact with city administration and manage various services offered by the city. Using mobile and social technology, the service platform will enable citizens to communicate with city officials, access amenities and services, report on issues and receive feedback from city officials. This will enable city officials to handle citizen concerns better, more rapidly gather feedback via social media and more effectively manage city resources to fulfill various needs of the citizens.

Intelligent Operations: IBM is enabling Palava to go beyond "smart instrumentation" and be a truly interconnected and intelligent city by integrating different service areas such as energy, water, transportation, public safety and smart cards with a central command and control center. The central command and control center will monitor the health of key city systems and take coordinated action to handle any disruptions or emergency situations in the city. This will also enable the use of Big Data Analytics, enabling the city to predict and prevent issues that could affect quality of life, ranging from traffic congestion to emergencies.

Public Safety: IBM is using expertise from numerous client engagements to define and set up technology enabled procedures to effectively handle different types of situations that could affect the city. This further accentuates Lodha's vision of public safety as one of the primary focus areas for Palava. IBM will support a central hub to monitor and enable coordination among Palava city and agencies involved in public safety and emergency management. Centralized city operations will allow for real-time monitoring of incidents and enable public safety personnel to take quick coordinated actions.